In March 1447, a great fire broke out in Valencia, caused by a former member of the municipal government. This fire destroyed many houses and craft workshops around the Market Square, the economic centre of the city. The municipal government had to compensate the citizens, who had lost everything, and restore everyday life in the area. A versatile Italian watchmaker living in Valencia was chosen to supervise the rehabilitation of the area. Under his direction, the debris was removed. Then after a conscious campaign of urban planning aimed at eliminating any traces of the old Islamic city, the streets were reconstructed according to the norms of the western city.

This article looks at how and why Bonfire Night celebrations became more peaceful in the later nineteenth century in some smaller Kent towns and what this process reveals about local civic cultures and identities. The drive towards respectability is seen both in the changing business relationships between participants, spectators and local tradesmen and in the evolving role of satire within processions. The ‘social energy’ visible at these events was channelled such that earlier class and other vertical conflicts within these towns were superseded by horizontal rivalries without, as they competed against each other (an important local variant of civic boosterism) to build free public libraries, for example. Moreover, more peaceful ‘Fifths’ and better reading facilities were linked, since both formed part of the much-altered prevailing civic cultures in these towns – their comprehensive, continuous, identity-driven efforts to present themselves in the best possible light against their rivals.

The post-war reconstruction era was marked by numerous planning exhibitions which provide a window on the contemporary nature of communication and consultation in planning practice. The 1943 Exhibition of the County of London Plan prepared by J.H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie was a major event with the king and queen making a high-profile visit. This article describes the making of the exhibition, considers its content, design and historical significance and reflects on its importance as a high water mark in the culture of twentieth-century town planning promotion generally and exhibition culture specifically. Archival research reveals how the London County Council (LCC) negotiated for resources from the central government and the local boroughs in hosting and organizing the event and how crucial these negotiations were in its eventual staging, marketing and impact.

As the population of Khartoum increased during the 1940s, the Sudan government sought to demolish the Deims that surrounded the southern edge of the city and relocate the residents to a new planned site. Here, it was envisaged that improved housing would help to create ‘modern’, model families. However, like many of the post-war housing projects in British Africa, the resettlement of the Deims was undermined by poor planning, inadequate financial support and resistance from residents, who rejected the colonial planners’ vision of how domestic life should be organized.

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin described Paris as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’, the hub of cultural transformations precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. For good reasons, Jewish historians have followed suit in identifying Paris as the focal point for studies of political, social, cultural, demographic and economic change in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, native French Jewish religious and cultural administrative structures, implemented during Napoleon I's reign and further entrenched by reforms in the Third Republic, are centred in Paris. These conditions have rendered an abundance of source material documenting the rest of the country from the centre, a phenomenon that places even more weight on the capital as a locus for national processes that occur in its image.

In the spring of 1938, Strasbourg's Jewish youth organizations inaugurated the Merkaz Ha’Noar, the community's first Jewish youth centre, which aimed to provide a safe, healthy and controlled environment for the development of young Jews in a rapidly transforming city on the border between France and Germany. The centre offered a unique location from which to reimagine Jewish and French history on the eve of World War II, and illustrates the power of the built environment of the city and its physical structures to forge new kinds of communities, identities and politics.

This case-study of Jewish activism in Strasbourg and Nice, interwar urban locales situated along the frontiers with National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy, respectively, examines critical facets of Jewish advocacy during the refugee crisis of the 1930s. It focuses on how urban spaces engendered dense thickets of community activism unlike that which took place in Paris. Whereas friction and ineffectiveness characterized aid efforts in Paris, these cities offer alternative views on the nature of the refugee crisis in France and the ways that Jews overcame obstacles to help asylum-seekers. It advances much-needed discourse on the complexity of French Jewish experiences during the interwar years and highlights the city as both location and a conduit for diverse activist strategies. Although circumstances varied in Strasbourg and Nice, Jews in these two borderland cities followed similar patterns of engaging urban civil society to build flexible networks that addressed the plight of refugees from multiple angles.

This article examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman's writings on Paris – its history and specific places within the city – we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it meant to be ‘French’.

The fields of urban history and visual culture both thrive on expansive horizons. Streets and rivers, neighbourhoods and stadia, festivals and parks populate the work of urban historians, who examine these and other subjects from local, metropolitan, regional, national and transnational perspectives. Viewing these urban themes with and through visual culture increases the potential areas of analysis exponentially. Not only do photography, film, television and advertising produce countless images of urban spaces, visual culture encourages scholars to take seriously the ways of seeing and practices of looking that shape how people understand and engage with the metropolis. Visual technologies, both old and new, make places meaningful in ways that have broad cultural, political and economic consequences. As digital tools continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing and analysing these myriad urban sights.

Visual representations of the Lower Hill District created by Pittsburgh's redevelopment coalition and by neighbourhood insiders reveal the conflicting ways redevelopers and residents understood older neighbourhoods and their redevelopment. Redevelopers’ maps and photographs of the Lower Hill documented the neighbourhood's densely built-up blocks and intermixture of land uses as definitive examples of blight that threatened downtown's economic health. Models and architectural sketches of the Civic Arena – the jewel of the Lower Hill's redevelopment plan – promised to wipe away blight and renew the city. Redevelopers distributed their imagery through brochures and the city's daily press. Framed by captions labelling the Lower Hill a ‘blight’ and the Civic Arena a ‘wonder of the modern world’, these images helped sell the public on redevelopment. Lower Hill insiders, most notably the city's African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Courier’s lead photographer, Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, envisioned the Lower Hill and its redevelopment differently. Harris and the Courier criticized the neighbourhood's dilapidated housing but celebrated its thriving social life. They also supported redevelopment but saw it primarily as a route to new jobs and improved housing for Hill residents. After the Civic Arena opened in 1961, redevelopment failed to deliver more jobs or better housing because redevelopers’ worldview prioritized the built over the social environment. Hill District residents, led by the Courier, reacted to these shortcomings with visual protests pairing redevelopers’ favourite symbol of progress – the brand new Civic Arena – with symbols of racial injustice. By spotlighting the inequalities that undergirded redevelopers’ vision for the city, these protests stopped redevelopment from spreading further into the Hill in 1968.

When Photorealism arrived on the art scene in the 1960s, it received considerable media attention for its striking illusionism and unparalleled commitment to fusing painting and photography. But many judged the style to be merely retrograde realism disguised by the use of contemporary source photographs or, more harshly, as an unthinking reproduction of capitalist culture – i.e. a kind of toothless Pop art slickly rendered for the masses. Though the style now constitutes a familiar part of the contemporary art world, few have sought to understand or mitigate several decades of critical antipathy and neglect. This essay examines painter Robert Bechtle's work, contra the historic assumption of Photorealism's social irrelevance. Bechtle's images of San Francisco, defined by architecture and automobiles ubiquitous in post-1945 Californian neighbourhoods, present the city without overt commentary. Yet, through this seemingly ordinary iconography, the artist upends deep-rooted urban visual paradigms, linking the traditionally vaunted city centre to its apparently subsidiary suburbs. Bechtle offers the viewer not iconic landmarks or arresting vistas, but rather a way to comprehend how everyday life in the city is informed by significant configurations of residential architecture, under-remarked geographic particularities and historical development that blurs the distinction between centre and periphery. These representational strategies are central to understanding the ways in which the Bay Area – and indeed much of post-war America – is experienced as built environment and social space.

Summoning the popularity and prestige of cinema, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) invented the image of Baghdad for Iraqi audiences as the sight/site of oil modernity in the 1950s. In other words, oil urbanization, or the modernization of the city as shaped by the petroleum industry and its revenues, in Iraq cannot be understood apart from the representation of Baghdad as visible evidence of petroleum's promise to benefit the national population. The British-controlled oil company in Iraq produced a programme of at least two-dozen sponsored films and cine-magazine episodes between 1951 and 1958, which this essay examines as an emblematic case of neo-colonial film, constituting an archive of media practices that bridge the categories of colonial film on one hand, and industrial film on the other. After World War II, the Atlantic Charter reinforced the right to democratic self-rule as a global norm and the British state developed creative tactics to abet its continued control over strategic resources in its colonized territories. Oil above all became central to this story and, as this essay will show, British oil companies played a fundamental role towards reinventing the imperial project in the post-colonial context of Iraq. Through a contextualized analysis of the IPC films, I argue that the company public relations office utilized the conventional approaches and standard formats of colonial and industrial film – including montage, scripted voiceover and staged b-roll – to narrativize the association between neo-colonialist practices of oil extraction and national development as causal, inherent and positive.

This essay examines a body of films that represent and re-enact the infamous 1964 Catherine Genovese rape and murder, helping to define the crime as a problem of bystander non-intervention exacerbated by urban living conditions and the ‘high rise anxieties’ of apartment dwellers. The moving image culture around the Genovese case tells a story about male violence against women in the city through the perspective of urban apartment dwellers, who are portrayed as bystander witnesses to both the city and to the social relations of stranger sociability in the city. Films depict the killing of Kitty Genovese, sometimes through fictional analogues to her and the crime, as an outcome of failed witnessing, explicating those failures around changing ideas about urban social relations between strangers, and ways of surveilling the city street from apartment windows. By portraying urban bystanders as primarily non-interventionist spectators of the Genovese rape and murder, films locate the conditions of femicide and responsibility for it in detached modes of seeing and encountering strangers. By analysing film as forms of historic documentation and imagination, as artifacts of historically and contextually different ways of telling and revising the story of the Genovese murder as one of bystander non-intervention in gender violence in the city, the essay conceptualizes film and filmic re-enactments as a mode of paying witness to the past.

‘Busing’, in which students were transported by school buses to achieve court-ordered or voluntary school desegregation, became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues in the decades after Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). Focusing on Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe, this essay examines how busing opponents turned the conventions of television news – its emphasis on newsworthy events and crisis; its selective use of historical context; and its nominal political neutrality – to their advantage, staging television friendly protests that positioned mothers and children as victims of activist judges and federal bureaucrats, and framed their support for segregated neighbourhoods and schools in the colour-blind rhetoric of homeowners’ rights. For politicians who aspired to the national stage, like Florida Governor Claude Kirk, busing offered a recognizable issue on which to take a stand. When Kirk protested court-ordered busing by suspending a local school board in Manatee County (Bradenton, Florida) and appointing himself school superintendent, he was not only appealing to Florida voters but also to television viewers in cities like Nashville, St Louis and Seattle, many of whom wrote to convey their support. When Vice-President Spiro Agnew complained that television network news ‘can elevate men from obscurity to national prominence within a week’, he was referring to Black Power author and activist Stokely Carmichael, but television news also propelled grassroots anti-busing activists like Irene McCabe to national prominence. McCabe, who staged a widely covered six-week march from Pontiac to Washington DC to protest busing, made frequent television appearances because networks deemed her newsworthy, not necessarily because newscasters agreed with her politics. Repeated television coverage turned relatively minor busing battles in Bradenton and Pontiac into national news and established Kirk and McCabe as icons of busing opposition in the early 1970s.